"You have your wonderful memories",
people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are
by definition of times past, things gone . Memories are the Westlake uniforms
in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the
weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the
funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what
you no longer want to remember.

In fact I no longer value this kind of memento.
I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what
got wasted.

… objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution.

[…]

I continue opening boxes.
I find more faded and cracked photographs that I want ever again to see.
I find many engraved invitations to the weddings of people who are no longer
married.
I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer
remember.
In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment.
In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequate I appreciated the moment
when it was here.
How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I
could never afford to see.

1.
Time passes.
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms
to what we think we remember.

2.This was never supposed to happen to her,
I remember thinking – outraged, as if she and I had been promised an exemption-
in the third of those intensive care units.

3.Time passes.
Could it be that I never believed it?
Did I believe the blue nights could last forever?

4.
In fact I no longer value this kind of memento.
I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what
got wasted.

5.
… objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution.

6.
I put the word “diagnosis” in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which
a “diagnosis” led to a “cure”, or in fact to any outcome other than
confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility.

7.
I had seen the charm, I had seen the
composure, I had seen the suicidal despair.

jueves, 26 de junio de 2014

1.
The unwritten contract of erotic friendship stipulated that Tomas should
exclude all love from his life. The moment he violated that clause of the
contract, his other mistresses would assume inferior status and become ripe for
insurrection.

2.
… spending the night together was the corpus
delicti of love.

3.
He never spent the night with the others. It was easy enough if he was at their
place: he could leave whenever he pleased. It was worse when they were at his
and he had to explain that come midnight he would have to drive them home
because he was an insomniac and found it impossible to fall asleep in close
proximity to another person. Though it was not far from the truth, he never
dared to tell them the whole truth: after making love he had an uncontrollable
craving to be by himself; waking in the middle of the night at the side of an
alien body was distasteful to him, rising in the morning with an intruder
repellent; he had no desire to be overheard brushing his teeth in the bathroom,
nor was he enticed by the thought of an intimate breakfast.

4.
Lying there looking at her, he could not quite understand what had happened. But
as he ran through the previous few hours in his mind, he began to sense an aura
of hitherto unknown happiness emanating from them.
From that time on they both looked forward to sleeping together. I might even
say that the goal of their lovemaking was not so much pleasure as the sleep
that followed.

5.
Lying in a hearse as big as a furniture van, she was surrounded by dead women. There
were so many of them that the back door would not close and several legs
dangled out.
‘But I’m not dead!’ Tereza cried. ‘I can still feel!’
‘So can we,’ the corpses laughed.

6.
To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.

7.
Looking back on the years he had spent with her, he came to feel that their
story could have had no better ending. If someone had invented the story, this
is how he would have had to end it.
One day Tereza came to him uninvited. One day she left the same way. She came
with a heavy suitcase. She left with a heavy suitcase.

8.
His love for Tereza was beautiful, but it was also tiring: he had constantly
had to hide things from her, sham, dissemble, make amends, buck her up, calm
her down, give her evidence of his feelings, play the defendant to her
jealousy, her suffering, and her dreams, feel guilty, make excuses and
apologies. Now what was tiring had disappeared and only the beauty remained.

9.
On Saturday and Sunday, he felt the sweet lightness of being rise up to him out
of the depths of the future. On Monday, he was hit by the weight the likes of
which he had never known. The tons of steel of the Russian tanks were nothing
compared with it. For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s
own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels, with someone, for someone, a
pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
He kept warning himself not to give in to compassion, and compassion listened
with bowed head and a seemingly guilty conscience.

10.
When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.

11.
She took after her mother, and not only physically. I sometimes have the
feeling that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother’s, much as
the course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the
player’s arm movement.
Where and when did it begin, the movement that later turned into Tereza’s life?

12.
Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of
necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance
can speak to us.

[…]

Necessity knows no magic formulae – they are all left to chance, if love
is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it
like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.

13.
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the law of
beauty even in time of greatest distress.

14.
Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect some day to suffer
vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of
falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped
with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of
falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us,
it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

15.
She was on the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant
state of vertigo.
‘Pick me up’, is the message of a person who keeps falling. Tomas kept picking
her up, patiently.

miércoles, 25 de junio de 2014

"The line of her lips forms a
childish pout, and at the same time her lips are very kissable…. She turns up
her nose at elegant clothes, jewels, girdles, perfumes, makeup, and all
artifice. Yet her walk is lascivious and a saint would sell his soul to the devil
to watch her dance…"

domingo, 22 de junio de 2014

I think of him
he used to be the image of this city
- not so long ago-
The buildings are full of ashes.
I never told him this
but he smelled like a dead man
I always thought he was about to die
in any moment,
today
the whole city smells like him:
it’s rotten.

miércoles, 18 de junio de 2014

A lot more to come, can't I just copy and paste all of his books? magnificent

1.

But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be
strong enough to leave.

2.

For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs
so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by
the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

3.

Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman
are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not
make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an
infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited
to one woman).

4.

In the sunset of dissolution,
everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

5.
Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A
single metaphor can give birth to love.

6.

Physical loveis
unthinkable without violence.

7.

What is flirtation? One might say that it is behavior leading another to
believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility
from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.

8.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on
cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?

9.

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is
no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like
an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for
life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, “sketch” is
not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork
for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an
outline with no picture.

10.

The only relationship
that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place
and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.

martes, 17 de junio de 2014

My
life has taught me that remembering Time – that line connecting all the moments
that Aristotle called the present – is for most of us a rather painful
business. When we try to conjure up the line connecting all the objects that
carry those moments inside them, we are forced to remember that the line comes
to an end, and to contemplate death. As we get older and come to the painful
realization that this line per se has no real meaning – a sense that comes to
us cumulatively in intimations we struggle to ignore – we are brought to
sorrow. But sometimes these moments we call the “present” can bring us enough
happiness to last a century, as they did if Füsun smiled, in the days when I
was going to Cukurcuma for supper. I knew from the beginning that I was going
to the Keskin house hoping to harvest enough happiness to last me the rest of
my life, and it was to preserve these happy moments for the future that I
picked up so many objects large and small that Füsun had touched, and took them
away with me.

(288).

For
me, happiness is in reliving those unforgettable moments. If we can learn to
stop thinking of our lives as a line… treasuring our time instead for its
deepest moments, each in turn, then waiting eight years at your beloved’s
dinner table no longer seems such a strange and laughable obsession but rather
(as I would discover much later) assumes the reality of 1,593 happy nights at
Füsun’s dinner table. Today I remember each and every evening I went to supper
in Cukurcuma – even the most difficult, most hopeless, most humiliating
evenings – as happiness.

lunes, 16 de junio de 2014

When I stared at himthrough listless eyes
he would sit down in front of me
just to look into my eyes,
silently;
we knew there was no need
of breaking our silence,

we knew we were safe.
Sometimes he would become a bird
jumping out of his balcony
and flying
just to come back some hours later,
sometimes his flat would be full of cats
- fornicated cats
sad and intelligent cats
but specially hungry cats -
In the long Summer afternoons
we would sit down looking at
the sand of the Sahara
that the wind brought
every sunset to the sky.
We would read poetry and novels
and we would cry
he would read to me and his voice
would break at some point
and I would caress him
and kiss his forehead
I would be tender
as if kissing my dog
and if someone would ask me years later
if I was happy
I would say yes,
those were one of the happiest moments
in my life.